


Nothing's changed

by sb_essebi



Series: Geralt/Yen + Witcher!Ciri 'verse [1]
Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher (Video Game)
Genre: Canon-typical swearing, Declarations Of Love, F/M, Geralt is hopelessly in love okay?, Light Angst, mission: The Last Wish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-08
Updated: 2020-06-08
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:42:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24604111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sb_essebi/pseuds/sb_essebi
Summary: Geralt and Yen tame a Djinn, undo Geralt's last wish and find out they still have heaps of magic of their own left.(Geralt's thoughts and feelings during the dialogue in The Last Wish after Yen releases the Djinn.)
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg
Series: Geralt/Yen + Witcher!Ciri 'verse [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1778605
Comments: 8
Kudos: 54





	Nothing's changed

**Author's Note:**

> I've been playing the Witcher games and I'm obsessed! I have lots of fic I really want to get out of my system before I read the books and fall into "book-canon-is-the-only-canon mode". The voice acting in this cutscene is amazing and the scene in general is so romantic, I'm so in love with Yen and Geralt's love I just have to write about them. 
> 
> All the dialogue except a bit at the end is from the game, so credit to CDPR, transcribed by me because the only game transcript online is full of mistakes.
> 
> If you like the fic, please consider leaving a comment, it means the world to me. Find me on tumblr @sb-essebi

The Djinn dissolves into thin air and shimmering fragments of ice.

The spell is gone –Yen wouldn’t have released the Djinn otherwise- but Geralt feels no different.

Yen looks shaken. She turns her back to him, facing the sky and the distant mountaintops. She looks every bit as perfect as the day he met her. Geralt’s heart aches with the affection he got so familiar with not long after that.

No, he feels no different.

“Storm’s over.”

“Yes. It’s all over.”

Yen’s words chill him to the bone in a way neither the Djinn’s winds nor the cold mountain air had. His chest feels tight, like it’s trying to keep his heart still.

“Maybe we should sit. You look a bit dazed.”

He isn’t sure she does, though, for she refuses to face him. But he _has_ to say something. He can’t just let her walk away on him.

“I’m not, but we can sit.”

She glances in his direction as she says this, but never meets his gaze.

They sit, their legs dangling off the ship’s bridge, the entirety of the Skellige Isles visible thousands of feet below them, swimming in mist.

He waits, as he always does. Waits for her to make the first move. He’s always been aware he’d sorta forced her into this thing, with his wish, and he wanted Yen to feel in control. Hell, he knew that Yen _needed_ to feel in control. So he’s always let _her_ initiate things, let her set any boundaries she might need.

She sits with her back straight and her hands in her lap, looking down, her hair hiding the side of her face from him, while he sits at a respectful distance but leaning towards her, longing for her as he always has, staring at her, wondering if this will be the last time she’ll allow him to.

There’s something off about her, about the line of her shoulders. Like she’s lost, like someone pulled a rug from under her feet. Yennefer hardly ever showed any vulnerability at all; Geralt isn’t used to seeing her like this. It terrifies him.

He swallows thickly. Gods, he loves her. He loves her so fucking much. If it turns out that she doesn’t want him and, worse, that his wish has forced her to do so for so many years… he’s not sure his heart could take it.

Her conviction that it was all just a spell, her determination to undo his wish… they made him doubt his own feelings, because surely if Yennefer of Vengerberg is so certain about it, it must be the truth. Oh, he’s wondered before whether things would have gone differently without the wish, whether they’d have met less, or never met again at all, but never, not for a second, did he doubt his feelings were real… or hers.

He waits, but Yen says not a word.

_“Just once you might try to take the initiative.”_

_“Would you even **let** me?”_

_“It would depend on the situation.”_

He takes a deep breath to steel himself.

“Feel any better?”

“I told you, I’m fine.”

Her words are icy, and he tries to smother the panic they cause him. It’s been a very long time since she’s hidden her heart from him like this.

“Don’t need to play tough for me. That was a hard fight- maybe not as hard as the last time we tamed a Djinn, but _still_ -”

She gives the briefest laugh. Their eyes meet and he does his damnedest to read her thoughts through them.

“No comparison, I’m afraid. Half of Rinde suffered then, now I’m merely a bit tired.” She pauses, looks at him properly. Her eyes and her voice soften. “Thank you for coming, Geralt. I’d have had a much harder time of it on my own.”

“ _Well_ , never could say no to you.”

_‘Cause I love you. I’m crazy about you. Feel like I’ll lose my mind if you don’t tell me what I mean to you.’_

His tone of voice definitely betrays how nervous he is.

“Mmmh. Perhaps that will change now.”

_‘It won’t. It’ll never change. I don’t **want** it to change.’_

He uses every ounce of his meditation training to keep calm, or at least a semblance of calm.

“Feel anything? That anything’s… different?”

“Hm. I expected… _I don’t know_ what I expected, actually. A bit of vertigo, perhaps.” She pauses and he waits for her to continue, his chest tight, unable to breathe. “I thought… you’d become a stranger to me. That I’d look at you and not feel a thing…” And she does look at him. Her eyes are misty, her pupils blown. Geralt blinks. Swallows. His heart is hammering in his chest. “But it’s not like that at all.” It’s the way she says it, with her voice changing pitch slightly and the sweetest little smile timidly blooming on her face. “Nothing’s changed.”

_Oh, thank the Gods._

Damn. The way her voice breaks on the last syllable, with… with… _hell_ , with happiness and relief and- and- _damn_. He tries his best to keep his cool, has to look away a sec to do so.

“Djinn mighta cheated us after all,” he says all serious, nodding for emphasis. 

He privately delights in the confusion in Yen’s eyes, the tiny little frown on her face.

“Why?”

“Cause I don’t feel that anything’s changed either.”

Her small, shy smile then is the best, purest thing he’s ever seen. He almost doesn’t trust his voice when he says

“ _I love you, Yen_.”

Damn. His voice broke alright.

“And I love _you_.”

_Damn it all_. The way she says it! Nodding resolutely, like saying it feels _right_.

He’s dying to kiss her, feels giddy with the need to, but it’s like he can’t move. He can’t take his eyes off her, can’t believe his luck. He thanks every god and spirit he knows of that after so much pain and hardship he gets to have this one thing in his life, he gets to have Yen… he needed this. Needed her. Needed this win, to keep him going, to keep him fighting to find Ciri.

Yen just gazes at him in a way she never has before, open and trusting and _adoring_ and his body moves on its own.

He jerkily reaches for her and she meets him in the middle. The scent of lilac and gooseberries fills his lungs in a rush. She gives him the sweetest, softest kiss he’s ever gotten and it takes his breath away, gives him goosbumps on every inch of his skin.

Yen gasps in a breath, then another straight after, like she’s breathless too, like she can’t believe it either. He kisses her back once, twice, three times, tentative and gentle, but Yen returns it hurriedly, frenziedly, like she wants to eat him whole and Geralt’s lost in it. _Lost_. She’s usually so sparing, so measured with her kisses, he treasures them like rare jewels— has she always wanted to kiss him like this, and held back? Gods, the thought arouses him beyond belief and makes him wanna melt with tenderness at the same time… then Yen bites his lower lip. _Hard_.

“ _Ow_. What was that?”

She laughs, and the sound just about melts his heart. She’s happy. So happy. Damn. _He_ did that.

“It can’t be all sweetness and light.”

“Strange,” he muses. “Done that so many times… but it felt like our first kiss to me.”

“It was, in a way. Besides… once you say ‘I love you’ a kiss has to taste differently.”

“Maybe we oughta test a few other things.” Surely Yen can’t expect his mind to stay out of the gutter after kissing him like that. “Amos’ cabin looked cosy...”

“Not so fast, Geralt. We’ll have plenty of time to visit cosy cabins later… but I doubt the world will end if we sit here a while.”

Ah, _there’s_ the pricktease he knows and loves, but the playfulness in her voice warms his heart. He breathes past the lump of want in his throat and looks away, to the misty, tree-spotted mountains around them. He wraps an arm around her middle, unable and unwilling to be apart from her just yet, and pulls her close. He takes in a lungful of her scent, his favourite drug, mixed with the cold mountain air, and feels high on it. He smiles. He’s never done fisstech, but surely it can’t be better than this, can’t make his mouth water _so_ and his lungs burn so _good_.

Yen sighs, loudly and deeply, the tension leaving her body as she rests her head on the front of his shoulder.

“ _My_ , it’s lovely.”

“Mhm. Think the spirits of Skellige favour us.”

His smile grows wider, and he lets his cheek rest atop her head. He loves the feeling of her hair on his skin. In fact, there’s not a single thing about her he doesn’t love with his whole heart. It makes him want to laugh.

“I love you, Yen. I really do.” She turns a little to hide her face against his neck. He shivers at the feeling. “Always wanted to say that. Just never knew if you’d welcome it.”

Yen wraps her arms around him. There’s something about the way she holds him, like she’s afraid he might leave.

“Perhaps I would not have then… but I do now.”

_‘Cause you know it’s not the Djinn’s spell making me say it’_ , he thinks but doesn’t say.

He feels it in the way she tenses up a little, that this is all she’s going to say on the matter. He may be spontaneous –candid, she likes to say- and impulsive and he tends to rush headlong into everything, but Yen’s the opposite. Her thinking is layered, complex, calculative. She needs time to unpack it all.

He accepts it. He has to, even though he aches to say more. He’s not sure _what_ he’d say, exactly. A bunch of things. Maybe that he’s sorry about the wish, for ever letting her believe he didn’t make it _because_ he fell for her the moment he met her, because he knew she was his Destiny. For ever making her feel like she didn’t have a choice, like her life wasn’t hers –and he knows how much that must have frightened her.

He’s sorry for almost believing her earlier, when she confessed why she wanted the Djinn. He’s always known they were meant to be, he can’t believe he let himself doubt it there… but Yen’s always been so convincing, and he trusts her with his life and when she just said it like that, so convinced it’d all been a djinn’s doing… hell, he bought it. And he was terrified at the idea of breaking the spell. He’d rather live a lie than lose Yen. He wonders what she felt then, thinking that he too didn’t think they’d be anything without the spell… _shit_.

He gently lets go of her and rises to his feet before he can voice any of these thoughts. She’s not ready to have this conversation, and they’d only get into a fight. He’s so focused inward that they’re through a portal and back to her room at the inn before he can protest.

He’s not happy she wants to report to Emhyr –Geralt hates the bastard and he doesn’t want her _or_ Ciri anywhere near him, _ever_ … hell, _he_ doesn’t wanna be around him either. He’s worried sick about Ciri and the Hunt, he _needs_ to find her and damn him he _needs_ to talk about what happened with the Djinn. For once, Yen is so soothing and patient, never even raises her voice, so he thinks he’s safe to mention it but she quickly shuts him down.

_Fine._

He does what he’s always done, takes his emotions and hammers them down into a blade of sharp, problem-solving, monster-killing determination. He focuses on what he must do.

Get Uma.

Ride to Kaer Mohren.

Meet Yen there.

Find Ciri, together.

Then, he’ll never let Yen nor Ciri out of his sight ever again, and he’s gonna shower Yen with so much love she’ll forget the damn spell ever existed, and the three of them are going to be a family again.

Really, it’s just another contract. Only, this time, his happy ending is the reward.


End file.
